InMotion

What I saw looking up after reading the first article (Hari Kunzru) Lake Pontchartrain and the Causeway This post is experimental, and perhaps a bit too self-indulgent. Like an “experimental” performance at Sidebar NOLA . Check it out. I clicked on Vol. 2 (Johnny Vidacovich and Mahmoud Chouki) and am staying with it (very cool), but the livestream video had me clicking out quite early on. What I’m saying is: I am putting this on the blog. It’s raw, experimental. OK, enough of my excuses.  Here’s the post: (reflections on reading a magazine)  When I heard about Kim Stanley Robinson’s new novel, The Ministry For the Future , I felt certain that I had to find a way to read it. The way-finding can be interesting, and that’s the problem. Too interesting (the way-finding, that is). Earlier this week, I had my folding bike with me when I dropped our behemoth car off at the Toyota dealer for servicing. Carol and I had been pulling a trailer all across the country, and so we needed a larg

  Over the last several months, life has been complex, challenging and weird.   Friends and family and others signing on to trains of thought and channels of political action that seem wild and incomprehensible.   I’ve been glued to my podcast app (Pocket Casts) seeking to find and download the latest episode of what I always hope will be the explainer that illuminates.   “Help me make sense of this steaming pile of something-other-than-nourishment”.   Alas, as I found myself on the road in July and nowhere near the place where live music was for me a daily treasure chest (New Orleans), it’s been rare for music to enrich my life.   In my home (either our Condo in New Orleans or our small travel trailer on the road), we don’t have ambient music on.   If you want it, it’s got to go into your ears with buds or headphones.   And as I said, Ezra Klein or Sam Harris or Marc Maron or Kara Swisher or whomever are much more likely to be on my playlist than the new Bruce Springsteen album.   I r

  I have been regularly listening to a podcast called Making Sense  by Sam Harris, a neuroscientist and famous published atheist and podcaster.   He may be animated by contrarianism, but to a fault, he wants to take a look at all sides of things it seems to me, to take a look at this thing   as meditation teacher Rodney Smith likes to say.   After the protests in the aftermath of George Floyd’s killing by the police officer, and the aftermaths of the protests, and the other things going on in the cities in the name of Black Lives Matter, Sam Harris posted an episode of the podcast wherein he reflected on what he thought was going on and how the overall orientation of what we consider to be the BLM movement   might lead to more suffering, particularly that such an orientation could contribute significantly to the possibility of a second Trump term.   A few months later, Harris had Columbia university professor John McWhorter on his podcast discussing racism, identity politics, double st

Carol and I are back at the Lodge, doing minor repairs and I for one am trying to craft my travel buzz.  I notice that with long retirement days, I have an index of accomplishment that I keep referring to.  When the index gets too low, my buzz definitely feels less buzzy. More on that in a minute; I am wordsmithing now and if I get too jumpy, the text might disappear forever.   Have you ever been in the Wind River Range in Wyoming?  PFC. Earlier today we did a kick ass day hike up to Lake Louise whose waters eventually crash thru some tight gaps down into the Wind River and then into the Bighorn river and on to the Yellowstone.  Speaking of, we've decided to stay out of Yellowstone and Teton parks, fearing crowds.  Nevertheless, in a couple days we'll pull our home thru Jackson Wyoming and continue on, thru Pocatello and Boise.   About that index: I mean producing something or accomplishing something that maybe someone else can appreciate or use. I had my first session of Virtu

On the Delta Heritage Trail Have mask will travel, doing the museums in Helena.  As you may know, Carol and I are on the road.  We dusted off the Lodge (our Airstream Bambi Sport 22-foot trailer) and headed north. We finally pulled ourselves away from our daily rituals of worrying, reading, and bike riding, and got busy with research. Plans must be made. This is our 4th long-form RV trip, and we made a change in that our waypoints are going to be Rail-Trails instead of Craft Breweries.  Actually, we really didn't explicitly plan to visit breweries as waypoints in previous trips, it's just that they are everywhere,  and the beer is inevitably good, not to mention the great people associated with these family and dog friendly places.  Anyway, we will do the Delta Heritage Trail in SE Arkansas, the Katy Trail near St. Louis MO, Chichaqua Valley Trail in Iowa, Red Jacket Trail near Minneapolis, Georges S. Mickelson Trail in the Black Hills, William J. Mentock Trail in Wyoming, Bitt

I’m wondering what there is to celebrate here on The Fourth of July.   There’s of course the establishing of an independent country (becoming formally politically independent from the colonial power).   Then there’s celebrating time off from work for many people.     One might celebrate certain treasured features of this country, the USA.   It’s a place where science, engineering, innovation and risk-taking have helped to usher in the peace and prosperity many people in the USA and other countries enjoy.   Maybe one celebrates a belief that the USA helps to prevent deaths and suffering from conflict all over the globe in its role as world policeman.   Some may have   other ideas of how the USA makes the lives of those who live here or in other countries better, or safer, or easier.   Of course, many will simply want to celebrate the existence of USA because “we” live here and so do most of our friends and parents and children and siblings and extended family.   What’s not to celebrate

Carol and I said yes when Tim and Maggie asked us to join them on an outing.   They are avid adventure cyclists whom we met at the Saturday NOLA oldster social riders.   They have biked across the country, dipping the rear tire in the Pacific in San Diego and the front tire in the Atlantic at St. Augustine in northern Florida.   Not ones to eschew support, they had a full sag for the continent spanning ride, and their plan for our ride included car shuttles.   For our end to end ride of the combined Chief Ladiga and Silver Comet trails, here are the totals: 1.        Round trip to drive to the trail and back from NOLA: 1000 miles. 2.        Shuttling cars so that we did not do any out-and-back riding: 200 miles. 3.        Biking the trail from Anniston Alabama to Smyrna Georgia: 94 miles. 4.        McDonald’s Fish Sandwiches consumed (group total): 4 Tim, Maggie, Carol on the Chief Ladiga Trail in Alabama That’s 12.8 car miles per bike mile, a metric that I just ma

Well, we gotta do something! New Orleans French Quarter, May 2020  we'll get through this. Frenchmen Street Spring 2020 If you could hack into my journal, you would find a pretty down and desperate entry that I actually considered posting.   In it I attempt to describe my emotional state, and I blame the lockdown for uncovering and illuminating it. Stay-At-Home started here on March 22.   California was the first on March 19 and South Carolina the last on April 7.   Anyway, I’ve been stewing in the juices of my often dysfunctional cognitive and emotional regime.   Taking action, but it’s been really hard.   I know others are worse off than I while some are thriving and experiencing extra joy.   And of course, some are sick and others are grieving.   May we all find sources of strength and may we embody resilience.   My personal mantra, constructed during an online meditation class, is Breathe In Curiosity, Breathe Out Kindness .   Just breathe.

On April 17 , Fiona Apple released her fifth studio album, Fetch the Bolt Cutters .  I had planned to continue my research on Apple and publish a blog post about it. But I keep not doing it. Even though I still feel not ready to write the piece, I decided to just sit down and write anyway, feeling that I might be able to come up with something. I continue my early Sunday morning ritual of biking out into the city to find a copy of the Sunday New York Times.  I am sometimes not successful when we are on the road camping, but it’s really fun to try. Carol decided to subscribe again to The New Yorker , after dropping our subscription 10 or so years ago. I guess we love New York!  Anyway, I started reading a long Profile of Fiona Apple by Emily Nussbaum in the March 23 issue of The New Yorker.  When I realized after half an hour that I was only half way through the piece, which was really going deep, and that I had been fairly distracted while reading, I went back and started over.

Spotted on St. Charles in New Orleans.  This animal may be enrolled in the pre-human stage of the Covid-19 Challenge Vaccine Study.  Thank you for masking.  I was out bike riding in New Orleans yesterday evening, crossing the French Quarter, the Central Business District, and the Lower Garden District on my way deeper Uptown.  Traffic is down considerably.   Everything feels and looks different and yet it’s exactly the same.   It is very, very weird.   All this and no one here to enjoy it, with PERFECT weather.   I just had to keep riding upriver, taking it all in. Where are y’all!?   Just before turning around to head back downriver to the restaurant (Seed) where we ordered takeout food and the brewery (Courtyard) where our 3 crowlers  were waiting for us to pick up, I spotted the creature in the picture.   Ha!   When we “start opening back up”, we are all going to have to decide what our risk will be.   It’s going to be really hard.   I mean, to transition from trying to have

This post is inspired by writers.   After an uncharacteristic 8 hours of sleep, this morning I biked over to my local grocery to get the Sunday Times.   Having missed the special seniors-only hour of 7-8am, I was happy to find that the store was not crowded, and the staff were wearing masks as was I.   After using dilute bleach solution to wipe down my packages of bacon, coffee, orange juice and half&half, I perused the paper. As I often do, I turned to the Book Review section first, and leafed thru the Sunday Magazine next. Therein was inspiration. In the early 1990’s, I discovered the writer Michael Ventura .   I think my first encounter with his writing was a piece he wrote for his LA Weekly column Letters at 3 AM in January, 1991 just before the US started bombing Iraq after Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait.   It was an essay about the run-up to U.S. military action, and was entitled The Ghost of Randolph Bourne.     Bourne was an early 20 th Century journalist, social crit

This is a  pretty short post about my lifelong struggle with what in the past I’ve called “mild depression and anxiety” or “dysthymia” but will now call something else.  Thanks for reading.  I do not plan to focus on this in upcoming posts, but no guarantees.  I’ve mentioned struggles in the past, and may do so again. It’s a big challenge, and I am stoked to make some fundamental changes.  Is it possible that I could simply give something a name and in so doing change my relationship to it altogether, in a transformative way?  The new name would be LSE, or Low Self-Esteem.  I think it’s possible.  I am working from that position, in any case.  Here’s why: my therapist recommended that I read a book by Marilyn Sorensen.  Called  Low Self-Esteem: Misunderstood and Misdiagnosed , it was written primarily for therapists and rather than talk about how to address the problem, it calls out modern therapists for not understanding this or being able to really help sufferers of LSE.  I got

Report from New Orleans.   Heard a piece on the radio (actually, a “podcast”) about things that might help us as we try and figure out what to do with coronavirus.  There was a reading from Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabriel Garcia Marquez, about thinking each other’s thoughts and speaking what the other was just about to speak.  About being with those we know so well, actually being with them rather than having to rush out the door.  Love in the Time of Facebook certainly tempers drastically the potential for connection in a time of coronavirus.  We are worried about musicians, service staff at bars and restaurants, bathroom attendants, street performers of all kinds, and their families and circle of supported people.   Many of these workers, like our trombonist Jon, get paid not a salary or wage, but by tips.   If no one comes, they get nothing. I have googled things like “support for service workers” or “musicians and coronavirus in New Orleans” and so far have found